In New Year’s Eve, director Garry Marshall (of Pretty Woman fame) does something akin to what Richard Curtis did in Love Actually, a title that I still feel requires a comma, unless it’s in the imperative mood.
Instead of the Christmas rush in Love Actually, New Year’s Eve has the festivity of a week after Christmas, concentrated in a single day but spread across a range of characters and their activities. There’s a mother and a daughter, a couple of couples dealing with the imminent birth of a baby, an oldster on his last legs in a hospital, a man who’s got to be back in town by midnight, and so on.
The trick here is to weave the individual storylines into a coherent package, which Marshall and scriptwriter Katherine Fugate manage to do fairly well. They even manage to set up some surprises as the trajectories we can imagine for these characters turn out to be other than what we expect, although the denouements reached are mostly consistent with the clichés and conventions of the American mainstream cinema.
Actually, comma, Marshall and Fugate did pretty much the same thing with Valentine’s Day last year, so they have some practice.
There is no tragedy here, no hurt that cannot be salved; all is in line with the opening voice-over that tells us how New Year’s Eve symbolises hope in the future. There is no Occupy Times Square movement to disturb the general picture of a society largely concerned with the inner dramas of finding love, achieving redemption, or dealing with having a baby.
According to plan
Times Square, in fact, is the focal area of the movie, with Hilary Swank as the person in charge of the festivities there — in particular the big shiny ball on a pole, the ball that has to drop in stages at the countdown to midnight. This progress gives the movie its time frame, its spine as it were, as Swank battles the various obstacles and problems that arise in the run-up to the countdown. It is, naturally, vitally important that the ball fall just right and at the proper moment. A billion people, we are told, are watching on television. They must not be disappointed.
At exactly one hour into the movie, Swank gets to give the important speech that presumably sums up the moral lesson at the heart of New Year’s Eve. Exactly half an hour after that, we have another speech, this time from Josh Duhamel, that briefly tops up the message, and then we have 35 minutes to credits — and much resolution to fit in. That’s okay, though, because Fugate’s script and Marshall’s direction are as efficiently time-conscious as Mussolini’s trains.
If only all the different storylines were equally interesting, or populated by equally appealing actors. One strand has Michelle Pfeiffer doing dowdy, being a lonely older woman with a list of unfulfilled dreams, and an apparently chunked-up Zac Efron as the courier guy who takes on the challenge of fulfilling them. Luckily Pfeiffer’s dreams are not terribly outrageous, so Zac’s in with a fighting chance. The idea that the two of them might end up in bed together is piquant (she’s 53, he’s 24), but there are no writhing bodies in New Year’s Eve, or even the suggestion that sex may be more than a matter of kissing.
That strand of story, at least, is appealing. Contrast it with another that is much less appealing: this has Katherine Heigl as a caterer and Jon Bon Jovi as a pop star, and they’ve got a romantic history that has been suspended for a year or so but is about to resume as the festivities commence. Heigl is doing her best Bridget Jones here, and Bon Jovi is doing his best Bon Jovi, which doesn’t add up to much: he can do an okay pastiche of a 1960s soul singer, but asking him to play a man with complicated feelings is more than his acting skills or his inoperative facial muscles can bear. He’s just bloody irritating, and it’s hard to see what on earth the Heigl character sees in him.
Pretty or plain
So it proceeds. Robert DeNiro is the man dying in hospital; Halle Berry is his caring Nurse Aimee. Less predictably, Ashton Kutcher is stuck in a lift with Lea Michele; his bizarre garb is nearly as much fun as his easy charm. In general, the rule in New Year’s Eve is that the good-looking people are involved in romantic issues and the not-so-good-looking (or just old) people have familial matters to sort out.
There are some comic touches here and there, even the hint of an actual chuckle once or twice, but the charm and nice feelings that New Year’s Eve is supposed to project are, comma, actually, comma, ultimately so smothered in schmaltz that you emerge from the movie with an obscure desire to rush to the gym and burn off all that useless fat.
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